I couldn’t help writing a letter in response to the recent column titled “Past Due.” I don’t know if you can pass my letter on to the lady who wrote that letter to you, but if you could, it might help her.

Basically, at 23 years of age, I was in a relationship with a man I thought was going to be my husband. I wanted very much to start a family with him one day, and I behaved accordingly. He was very sweet toward me and acted very much like a faithful, permanent partner.

For the first five years of our relationship, we lived apart and saw each other mainly on weekends. It never occurred to me to worry about marriage at that point, although I was upset when he said he didn’t believe in marriage. Worse, he professed not to like children.

Although these were deal breakers for me, I stayed, thinking he would change his mind. I thought I loved him too much to leave. I thought he would change once we moved in together and he saw how wonderful it was to live with me.

Well, after five years, we managed to get work in the same area and moved in together. Not only that, we bought a house in our joint names! We were then living in a beautiful country town, with a primary school just around the corner. We had a huge double income and everything anyone could want before starting a family.

I was 28, so I wasn’t in a hurry, but I planned to have children by the time I turned 30. Over the next couple of years, everything I ever dreamed of with this man, fell apart. Although I worked hard at maintaining a family home, it didn’t help him to change his mind.

He still didn’t want children or marriage, and though he said he loved me, we started fighting—a lot. This culminated in him withdrawing physical intimacy, so for six months we slept in separate bedrooms.

Finally, I realized I no longer loved him. If anything, I hated him. I left, and he spent the first night alone crying his heart out. For months he begged me to come back. He even said he had been planning to propose.

For some reason, that statement hurt me the most—it filled me with a terrible, black rage. “How dare he wave the ring before me, after crushing my heart for seven years,” was all I thought. There was no way I was going back.

I have had one other serious relationship since. I was deeply in love with the man, but after two years I left him—he didn’t want to get married, either. I’ve learnt my lesson, though now that I’m 38, it may simply be too late.

Often, as I lay awake at night, I wonder what could have been had I not given the best years of my life to the wrong man.

Brianne

Brianne, thank you for your candor.

What you did is understandable because it illustrates two well-known tendencies of the human mind: confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Confirmation bias means we favor information that validates our beliefs and hopes, and motivated reasoning means we believe what we want to believe while ignoring conflicting information.

In short, when it’s something we like, we accept it. When it’s something we don’t like, we think, “I’ll change that.” That’s not realistic. What did he do wrong by telling you the truth? You are the one who decided not to believe him.

We can’t live thinking everyone else is a sheep and I am the owner. Life is more like sifting through the wrong to find what is right, or looking for the correct puzzle piece. Things should go together which fit together.

No mallet is big enough to bash square pegs into round holes.

Wayne & Tamara